Government to get new software to spy on social media conversations

THE Australian government is developing new software to monitor citizens' social media conversations.

The purpose of one tool, called Emergency Situational Awareness (ESA), is to give emergency services early warning about disasters.

It's taken the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) three years to develop and is being trialled by the Defence Department, the Queensland government and Geoscience Australia.

ESA works by mining publicly available Twitter profiles to detect clusters of tweeted words such as "fire", "earthquake" or "storm", and then passing that information to emergency authorities.

In August, the technology helped detect a grass fire near Cloncurry Hospital, in outback Queensland, before any triple zero calls were received.

"People who were driving past on the highway, albeit from a distance, were tweeting about it," Arwen Cross, CSIRO's communications adviser told AAP.

"And that happened before anyone thought to ring the fire brigade.

"It basically meant they could start looking at whether they needed to evacuate the hospital 20 minutes earlier than they would have if they'd been waiting for a phone call."

ESA also detected the fatal train crash at Dandenong South, Melbourne, on November 3.

CSIRO is developing a second social media monitoring tool, called Vizie, which may have far broader political implications.

The software detects and monitors conversation topics - including those which may be politically sensitive - across a range of websites.

One of the lead scientists working on Vizie envisages the software being used by government departments to receive feedback.

But CSIRO admits it also has a political dimension and could be used for public relations purposes.

Vizie differs from traditional media monitoring tools because it allows government departments to respond to users.

The tool could also end up being offered to private companies for brand monitoring.

It's being trialled by the federal government's Department of Human Services, among others, and has also been in development for three years.

It is not yet clear when either tool may be in full service.

Ms Cross says both Vizie and ESA only monitor publicly available conversations.

"When you send out a tweet you know that the world is going to read it," she added.